Archive: News

  • No-Visitor Policies Are Bad Medicine

    According to Dr. John Marshall, “Cancer care is not elective; it has to keep going. One of the worst policies for our patients right now is this no-visitor policy. You are coming for a treatment, a clinic visit, or, worse yet, admitted to the hospital for end-of-life care or for some complex medical procedure related to your cancer, and yet you can’t have a caregiver, an advocate, sitting next to you in your room.”

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  • Glimmers of Hope- New Strategies for Overcoming Treatment Resistance in Patients with BRAF-V600E-Mutated Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

    BRAF V600E-mutated metastatic colorectal cancer is notoriously difficult to treat due to an aggressive tumor biology and resistance to chemotherapy.

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  • Meet PanCan Research Grantee: Jill Smith, MD

    Jill Smith, MD, has a message for patients with pancreatic cancer: “Never lose hope, be strong and be encouraged.” Smith, a clinician-scientist and professor of medicine at Georgetown University and a member of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, tries to model those tenets herself.

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  • Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she is being treated for recurrence of cancer

    “The treatment she is getting is typical for pancreatic cancer. That would fit,” said John L. Marshall, director of the Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. “But her cancer history is very unusual, from a good perspective. She’s always done much better than one would have anticipated.”

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  • Dr. Jill Smith Receives Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Innovative Research Competitive Grant

    In this Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Translational Research Grant project, Dr. Smith’s team will study the effects of a drug, proglumide, and its actions to render pancreatic cancer more responsive to therapy.

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  • Practice-Changing GI Cancer Highlights From Virtual ASCO 2020

    Dr. John Marshall shares his personal highlights of GI cancers research from this year’s ASCO conference. There were a lot of important, practice-changing data and he touches on some big-picture themes that are really starting to hit home in GI cancer.

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  • Georgetown Lombardi Clinical Trial Helps Advance Use of Immunotherapy in Liver Cancer

    In August of 2016, Dan Hilton arrived at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital to be evaluated for a liver transplant. He had been diagnosed with cirrhosis, the result of a hepatitis C infection contracted many years earlier. After multiple tests, he received unexpected news; the doctors found tumors on his liver.

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  • Indivumed Global Alliance to Broaden Access to Multi-Omics Algorithms, Precision Medicine Education

    Germany-based Indivumed is enlisting the help of cancer centers and research institutions around the world to help expand its omics database and make it a key resource for unraveling the complexities of cancer biology and advancing new precision oncology drugs. Indivumed last month launched the Oncology Alliance for Individualized Medicine (Onco AI-Med), which is a partnership between leading cancer clinics and research institutions selected based on their research activities and expertise in molecularly informed cancer care.

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  • Colorectal cancer care in the age of coronavirus: strategies to reduce risk and maintain benefit

    We are in unprecedented times requiring us to approach our medical obligations in unprecedented ways. Cancer care is not elective and therefore must be maintained throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we recognize that there is early evidence based on small studies from China and Italy that cancer patients are at increased risk of severe illness if they are to develop a COVID-19 infection and there is even some evidence to suggest that healthcare providers are at increased risk, possibly due to exposure to larger viral loads and repeated exposure…

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  • FDA Approves Nivolumab Plus Ipilimumab in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma

    “The approval of nivolumab and ipilimumab in the second-line treatment of advanced HCC means we will have a combination immune therapy option in patients who have progressed on frontline therapy. The overall survival (OS) of nivolumab and ipilimumab in the second-line treatment of advanced HCC as shown in CheckMate-040 was very promising, so far the longest duration of OS in the second-line setting for advanced-stage HCC, tested in clinical trials,” said Aiwu Ruth He, MD, PhD, associate professor of Medical Oncology at Georgetown University.

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